ABSTRACT
The Doll Girl provided Harry B.Smith with his first real collaboration with Jerome Kern, the young composer who had written some of the music interpolated into The Rich Mr. Hoggenheimer, Little Miss Fix-It, The Siren, A Winsome Widow, and The Girl from Montmartre. Smith enjoyed working with Kern. Not only was he as rhapsodically melodic as the European composers of operetta, he was as harmonically up to date and syncopated as the best of the popular Tin Pan Alley crowd. What’s more, he was quick and, best of all, like Smith, he was a book collector who enjoyed acquiring manuscripts and autographs as much as the lyricist. Early on in their association, Smith took the composer to an auction house, where Kern acquired a copy of Endymion by John Keats by bidding $100; he later discovered a copy of Keats’s own signature, apparently unnoticed by the auctioneers, inside the book. The joy of that discovery was as valuable to both of them as the best of reviews about their work. The Doll Girl was still running when their second collaboration opened in Albany, New York, at the end of September. The show was Oh, I Say!, and was produced by the Shubert Brothers, with a book by Sidney Blow and Douglas Hoare, adapted from a French farce, Une nuit de noces, by Henri Keroul and Albert Barré. Sidonie de Mornay (Cecil Cunningham), a vaudeville actress, is supposed to be away on tour, so her maid, Claudine (Clara Palmer), rents out her apartment to a newlywed couple.The bride’s father, Jules Portal (Walter Jones), soon appears at the house because he has hired Sidonie and her entire company to perform for the wedding party, and Madam Portal (Jeffreys Lewis), concerned about her daughter, shows up as well. Needless to say, when Sidonie arrives, she is
not only shocked to find people in her home, she is over-whelmed by the fact that her ex-lover is the bridegroom.
